To celebrate Vikings Live, we have replaced our Roman alphabet with the runic alphabet used by the Vikings, the Scandinavian ‘Younger Futhark’. The ‘Younger Futhark’ has only 16 letters, so we have used some of the runic letters more than once or combined two runes for one Roman letter.

Reading Ancient Egyptian poems

Project team

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The Ramesseum papyri contain some of the most
famous of ancient Egyptian poems to survive, which pose the
difficult question: can we read such ancient works of art in
context?

The Tale of the Eloquent Peasant was composed around
1900 BC and is a passionate cry for justice that has often baffled
modern scholars but has inspired modern Egyptian artists, such as
the film maker Shadi Abd el-Salam. Drawing on experiences in
teaching this text in Oxford, Göttingen and Köln, British Museum
curator Richard Parkinson has re-published the main manuscripts to
enable a deeper engagement in the material aspects of the poem, and
simultaneously has been experimenting with performances to consider
the possible visceral aspects of ancient poetry.

The aim has been to investigate ways in which we can reconstruct
an integrated experience of reading ancient literary works, and
this has resulted in a new commentary written for anyone who wants
to read this poem in its original language, with integrated notes
on relevant aspects of grammar, historical background, intertext
and emotive responses.

Reading in context, in the shrine of
Heqaib, Aswan. Photograph T. G. Reid.

Publishing manuscripts

In a joint collaboration with the Egyptian Museum and Papyrus
Collection, Berlin, a new photographic record has been published of
the main 12th Dynasty manuscripts of the poem and the 13th Dynasty
manuscripts, complementing the online publication of P. BM EA
10274.

Helping readers

A ‘reader’s commentary’ on the poem has been published,
attempting to integrate text, translation and notes on a single
page and into a single experience; it was listed in The Guardian
newspaper’s
‘Books of the Year 2012’ by Ahdaf Soueif.

The next phase of the project will examine the companion
poem—and perhaps most famous of all surviving Ancient Egyptian
literary works — The Tale of Sinuhe. This will include a
new study of a major copy from the Ramessid Period, the giant
ostracon in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.

Images (left-right): the opening sections
of the poem in P. BM EA10274 rto; Ahmed Marei as the peasant in
Shadi Abd el-Salam’s film. Courtesy of the World Cinema Foundation
and the Egyptian Film Centre; Gary Pillai and Shobu Kapoor reciting
the Tale of Sinuhe.